Eden by Tim Lebbon
I would like to thank Lydia from Titan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Titan
Published – Out Now
Price - £8.99 paperback £4.68 Kindle eBook
In a time when Earth's rising oceans contain enormous islands of refuse, the Amazon rainforest is all-but destroyed, and countless species edge towards extinction, the Virgin Zones were established in an attempt to combat the change. Off-limits to humanity and given back to nature, these thirteen vast areas of land were intended to become the lungs of the world.
Dylan leads a clandestine team of adventurers into Eden, the oldest of the Zones. Attracted by the challenges and dangers posed by the primal lands, extreme competitors seek to cross them with a minimum of equipment, depending only on their raw skills and courage. Not all survive.
Also in Dylan's team is his daughter Jenn, and she carries a secret - Kat, his wife who abandoned them both years ago, has entered Eden ahead of them. Jenn is determined to find her mother, but neither she nor the rest of their tight-knit team are prepared for what confronts them. Nature has returned to Eden in an elemental, primeval way. And here, nature is no longer humanity's friend.
We are often scared of nature. Put us in the dark away from the streets and the world can be very inhospitable. Over the years we humans have stretched ourselves across the globe so you can find us living and littering from Everest to the depths of the sea; almost like we needed to push back and try to tame the world. This arrogance is now our undoing as the environment undergoes huge and potentially unstoppable changes – we seem incapable of remembering that saving the planet is actually saving humanity as the planet will be around billions of years after we are all gone. Tim Lebbon takes that fear and successfully merges it with environmental collapses in his new thriller/horror tale Eden.
In the not so distant future environmental collapse has significantly sped up; more animals extinct; more areas devastated by climate change and more hardship for people. As a potential way to help the planet recover a united earth created huge Virgin Zones by removing people and allowing nature to reclaim the land. Attempts to investigate these zones are blocked by armed guard, weapon drones and an air of something not being quite right about them. They’re therefore very attractive to certain types of people who enjoy thrills and adventure. Teams of global racers are racing to hit records and go through these new zones. Into this is Dylan and his crack team including his daughter Jenn, her partner Aaron, his new lover Selina, and his best friend Gee. With minimal technology going off the radar they are aiming to crack Eden the last zone for adventure. But Jenn is hiding a secret from her family and friends – she is aware her estranged mother Kat a similar thrill seeker has entered Eden ahead of them for a final adventure. All of them though are unaware of exactly how wild and dangerous Eden has become.
The first third of this is extremely skilled at raising the stakes and sense of something nasty going to happen. Lebbon paints a picture of a world gone sour and where life is cheap and these Virgin Zones for people like Dylan offer new adventures – not naturalists/exploiters but people who just want to explore the new and beat the opposition - be that racing in marathons or evading security patrols. They’re not an unlikeable bunch and as we meet the rest of the team, we see each is carrying some form of their own scars be it from war, depression or grief – these adventures offer them respite or a chance to recover. There aren’t huge gulfs between them they feel quite sympathetic and so once we reach Eden we feel for these people who may finally be out of their depth. The pace of the story doesn’t give us huge time to dwell on back stories, but we get a quick sense of who these people are or have been and their dynamics.
The way Eden is portrayed is fascinating it’s a land that has been emptied of humanity and purposely left alone. Rather than a post-apocalyptic vision of just major cities with bushes several decades in the team are shocked to see huge forests; rivers and a landscape very different tot hose the maps of the earlier time portray. There is a wonderful almost alien like sense of here is Earth unleashed and very fast aiming to wipe all traces of humans off it. But rather than a celebration of nature Lebbon makes it clear humanity is unwelcome now. Patrols have reputations for murdering intruders and also the team feel a lot more is watching them than human eyes.
If the first third is creating the sense of the other shoe coming to fall the last two thirds are about revelations; fears and trying to escape this inhuman paradise. The mystery of what happen ed to Kat and her crew is slowly revealed and what the crew discover is eerie and unsettling and then vicious and bloodied. Humans are regarded by something in Eden as a combination of pest and trophies. Eventually though Dylan’s team realise they are next in its sights. At this point the story focuses less on the spectacle and more the personal drive for survival as this small team find themselves very alone and fighting for their lives. I’ll be coy here as that reveal is very much key to the wider story but that feeling that nature has had enough makes the team’s opponents stunned and ultimately afraid. We feel loss, grief and anxiety for the characters as this horror unfurls and we move from epic discussion of wildlife to very basic battle of survival as people now race to escape their situation and its very neatly transitioned.
Overall, this is a very fast paced and effective scary thriller, but it is also one with a sharp message of how eventually nature will have its revenge and when it does it will be brutal to the unwary. It doesn’t dwell too much on the debate of what climate change is and its future impacts but rather uses this to remind we that humans alone versus the wild is a much less balanced battle than you’d think. A book great to read by the woods…just keep an eye out for what is in them.
